cybershoe

Pitch: Big Nerdy Brother. 4-6 contestants are locked inside Linus' house for a week while he's on vacation with the family, but all the smart home tech is busted. They need to earn points by getting things fixed before the family gets back. The producers can stoke the drama with various challenges, and Linus gets his stuff fixed. Win-win!

Sorry for the necropost, but this thing finally got built. Ended up making both rads intakes, with exhaust through the front as well as passive exhaust through the back due to the positive pressure design. I definitely put more into this case than it should be able to support, but it works, and draining the loop is only a moderate pain in the butt, as opposed to a massive one.

That's my plan B, but I like the idea of keeping everything visible. (Bling is one of my goals for the build.) If it turns out it just won't fit, I can go that route.

Hey folks, new member here, looking for advice on my new build. This will be my first PC build in about 14 years, and I'm admittedly going a bit overboard to make up for lost time. I'm trying to cram a lot into a pretty small case (Corsair 280X). I've looked up the dimensions for all of my components and mocked up two options for loop routing in Illustrator to check for fit (attached). I think I've sorted out two ways that I can run a loop, but I'm looking for advice. Red: GPU and CPU block Purple: Pump/Res (Corsair XD3) Grey: Rads Green: Fans Black: Tubing I'll probably need to fab a bracket for the pump (unless there's enough play in the included fan bracket, which I'm not counting on), I had considered a bigger case, but I really like the look of the 280X, and if I can make this work it would be my ideal design. Oh, and I'm going to try to do this with hardline, but I'm okay with flexible tubing if it turns out to be too much of a hassle. The bends in the pictures are illustrative, the actual bends and routes will probably change once I get things mounted and can see it in 3D. Advice is appreciated folks!

Okay, a little backstory: I haven't built a PC from scratch in just over 14 years. I went the console route and all of my PCs since then have been whatever my work assigned me, because for various personal and financial reasons I didn't have the resources or inclination to keep up with maintaining a custom rig. Now, I'm at a point in my life where I finally have the money, time, space and desire to build my version of a baller gaming PC. My goals for this build are to have a capable gaming rig that will play pretty much any title in the next few years with max or close to max video settings, run quiet, be exceedingly shiny, and make up for years of working on boring grey or black corporate laptops. In other words, lots of hardline tubing and gratuitous amounts of ARGB. Oh, also I really want to play Half-Life: Alyx. I've settled on most of my basic components, but there are a few places where I think I'm going to need to compromise (mostly on aesthetics), so I'm looking for ideas, inspiration, and opinions on the direction I can go. Budget: I'd like to keep this south of $5000 CAD, exclusive of monitor or peripherals. More than I'd normally spend, but I've been saving my pennies and this is going to be about 14 years of birthday presents to myself. Part selection so far: Case: Corsair 280X White CPU: Ryzen 9 3900x GPU: ROG Strix 2080 Ti OC RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB (2x16) Mobo: ROG Crosshair VIII Impact PSU: Corsair RM750x CPU Waterblock: Corsair HydroX XC7 GPU Waterblock: Corsair HyrdoX XG7 2080 Strix Rads: Hardware Labs Black Ice Nemesis GTR Satin White 240mm (x2, front and top) Pump/Res: Corsair HydroX XD5 Fans: 4x Corsair LL 120mm (front intake and top exhaust rads), 2x QL 120mm (bottom intake) Bling: Probably a metric shittonne of RGB strips. Maybe some glitter? The parts that I'm looking for feedback on: 1) Case selection. I really, _really_ like the look of the 280X. I've been waffling between that and a Lian Li PC-O11D, but in the end the aesthetics of the 280X won me over. That said, it looks like I won't be able to mount the GPU vertically, which I'd really prefer to do to show off the RGB in the waterblock. I know it's a small detail, but this thing is going to be a objet du désir for me, and looks are important to me for this build. So, two questions: any suggestions for other cases that match the form factor and overall look of the 280X that will accommodate a vertical GPU, or any suggestions for a mod to mount the GPU vertically that won't ruin the look of the back of the case? 2) Rad/fan placement. Cooling the CPU and GPU should be fine with a single 360, but since the case only fits 240/280 rads, I may as well build in the extra rad space and run the fans a bit slower. With the mini-DTX footprint of the Crosshair Impact, I figure the best places for rads are the front for intake, and top for exhaust. Because the front will be going through a filter, I want to put some QL 120s in the bottom to make sure the case is at slightly positive pressure (I live with cats, and I want to try to keep the dust and hair isolated to the filtered front intake where it can be cleaned more easily.) Any thoughts on that? Also, has anyone here with a 280X tried to put a 280 rad in the top along with a 240 in the front? Do they fit, or does the 280 in the top take too much space to fit fans and a rad in the front? 3) Coolant colour. My colour scheme is going to be black and white wherever possible, with colour brought in with all of the RGB. That said, clear coolant really doesn't speak to me. I've been considering using a cool blue coolant (something around the shade of glacier freeze Gatorade) as the sole pop of non-RGB colour. Either that or a shade of pink, both of which I think would work well with the unicorn vomit light patterns that I'll probably end up using. 4) Lighting/fan control. I'll end up with a Corsair commander pro and a couple of lighting nodes either way. I'm of two minds on how to control the fans/pumps though. On one hand, having the commander own everything seems like the cleanest solution; on the other, pump speed seems like the most critical variable to prevent hardware damage, and I'd like it to be controlled at as low a level as possible. (If the controller goes stupid and turns off my fans, it will take a while for the coolant to heat up and the system should heat up slowly enough to trigger a thermal shutdown before there's damage. If the pump stops, I'm not 100% confident that the system will halt itself before my CPU lets the magic smoke out. My plan so far is to have the pump connected to the mainboard headers and set the curve based on CPU/GPU temp, and have the fans attached to the Commander and set fan curve based on coolant temp. Is my logic sound, or are there factors I'm not considering? Any feedback is appreciated, I'm not planning on procuring any parts for another month or so, so I have plenty of time to agonize over my choices!

I'm a huge fan of the UniFi line of products, but there's a bit more to set up than a standard residential modem/router/wifi combo. You'll need to combine a controller (either a Cloud Key or software you run yourself), router, and one or more access points. That's fine with me though; in general, I prefer to have 3 components that each do one thing really well rather than 1 component that kind of sucks at 3 different things. (Or to quote Ron Swanson, don't half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.) Another gotcha with UniFi is the lack of WiFi 6 support (I expect to see hardware supporting 802.11ax sometime after the standard is ratified), so if that's important to you, you may need to look at consumer-grade products for the time being. In my home, I'm not concerned with super low latency or ridiculous throughput; anything that needs to be fast is hard wired. I'm more concerned with coverage and stability, and so far all of the Ubiquiti gear I've owned has been rock solid, unlike pretty much every other consumer-grade router or AP I've owned, which have all needed to be restarted from time to time.